Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (70 page)

Rachel and the five other winners read their poems bravely in front of the barrage of photographers and TV lights, and tears fill my eyes as Rachel finishes her poem about Tom. A moment of real pride.

A check through my speech in the taxi and a long, slow journey to St Katharine’s Dock. With some difficulty I find my way to the ‘Jock’, a stout, broad-beamed sailing barge. A small, quiet handful of journalists. Harley Sherlock looming above them all; the thin, heroic Gallic face is Pierre Bermond – Chairman of Transport 2000 International, who has come over for the press conference [called to introduce me to the media].

I start well with a couple of ad-libs, then dig into my speech, which I deliver as well as I could have hoped, but it seems to fall into a vacuum. I have some ringing phrases, which receive no reaction, and some jokes,
which receive no reaction. Maybe it’s like this at press conferences. To someone brought up on the need for audience response it is a little disconcerting. I introduce Pierre Bermond, who also is received in this polite vacuum.

A cycling magazine want a picture of me on my bike, an anti-road-widening campaigner wants me to come to the first day of a public enquiry.
The Civic Engineer
wants to take me to lunch and Capital Radio interview me on the round bed in the captain’s cabin. The owner of the ‘Jock’ is a very smooth fish, who clearly thinks that my involvement with such people is quite inexplicable.

From there by cab to
London Plus
, the BBC’s evening programme. Stuck in the worst traffic jam for years, and arrive breathless and am rushed straight onto the show. At least I have first-hand experience of the problems T2000 wants tackled. Home by cab at nine.

Phone rings immediately – it’s BBC
Breakfast Time
wanting me for tomorrow.

A fine day and sniff of a change to more generous weather in the air. To the Television Centre for 10.30. There are about 20 people in the studio involved in putting [my reading of]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
on the air.

For an hour and a half they check captions and I sit reading in make-up beside a make-up lady who looks exhausted, hardly exchanges a word with me and occasionally slumps forward onto the worktop, all in.

I’m aware, during the day, of the sad fact that for many people in the studio this is a dull job. The girl at the teleprompter reads her Ken Follett paperback at every available moment. A caption man, whose job is to put five caption cards in order every two hours, falls fast asleep as we begin to record.

The work required from so many people is so minimal, so unfulfilling, that I see with the force of a blinding clear light that any new technology which could replace some of these jobs would be relieving people not of noble struggle but of extreme monotony and boredom.

To the BBC for the third day running, this time to meet Innes Lloyd and mark the ‘official’ existence of
East of Ipswich
. Nat Crosby seems still to be the main choice of cameraman. Innes is extremely helpful and responsive over casting – and accepts that Tristram and myself are thinking away from big names.

Meet ‘the girls’, as Innes refers to the three ladies of varying ages who are the basis of the team – Thelma Hornsby, who was on
Three Men in a Boat
, is one of them. They seem very efficient and I have a confident feeling that the production will be well looked after. It will need to be. The shooting schedule is now only 23 days.

Up to Hampstead for lunch at La Cage Imaginaire with a reporter and photographer of
New Civil Engineer
.

Then to Julia Street to be photographed with a bike giving views on cycling in London. Cannot pose with my own bike as the saddle’s missing. Halfway through the photo-session Mrs Brown on the corner arrives back boisterously drunk and insists on being snapped with me. Later she confides ‘We’ve just been to a funeral.’

For some unknown reason Denis [our cat, not our producer] has chosen one of the busiest days of the week to pee on the sitting room sofa – for no apparent reason. Scrub down the offending parts of sofa, then out into a grey and wet street for the paper, only to find our bag of litter upturned. Stuff all that back, collect the
Guardian
, find that a dog has evacuated right outside the front door.

By taxi to Kensington Town Hall for a conference organised by T2000 with some money from the GLC.

I creep into the room, expecting a handful of keenies, but find that the place is full – 70 or 80 people – with their little tables and writing pads in front of them.

Listen to two platform speeches. Both much more critical than my own. Mayer Hillman of the Policy Research Institute is uncompromisingly in favour of immediate legislation to regulate private motoring.

I take the stage at two o’clock and feel loose and in control as soon as I get going. Deliver another mixture of laughs and, hopefully, serious scoring points. Over in about ten minutes, apologies and leave.

Have the feeling I may have rather overdone the ham.

John explains to me his new film ‘A Goldfish Called Wanda’. I am to play a man with a stammer who kills Kevin Kline by running him over with a steamroller. John bemoans the fact that he’s written himself another ‘boring, uptight authority figure’, but otherwise sounds very enthusiastic and is anxious to plan ahead so it can fit in with my dates.

My ‘dates’ depend on a conclusion to ‘Explorers’, to which I attend later this morning, for the first time in several weeks. Can make little headway. Suddenly free from weeks of tight deadlines, I’m momentarily lost, and cannot work out my priorities.

At seven I drive into London for a ‘reception’ at the Reform Club given by Richard Faulkner and Will Camp.
¹²⁵
(Faulkner’s 40th birthday, Camp’s 60th.) The Reform Club seems to embody the twilight of Empire better than any building I’ve been in. Apart from telex machines, there is little inside this time capsule to suggest that the Boer War is not still in progress. Huge Corinthian columns dominate the interior spaces, which are grand and dusty and faded. Leather armchairs, a few people scattered about drinking and talking.

Upstairs and round a gallery to the immense and gloomy library. Here, a gathering of about 100-150 is swallowed up in the vastnesses of shelves ten stories high, more Corinthian columns and a soothing old brown ceiling with panels and stucco.

And quite a gathering – Michael Foot, Peter Shore and one or two less well-known Labour front-benchers. Bob Hughes and Prescott and others. Norman Lamont and a smattering of Tories. I feel like a new boy at school. People keep asking me who I want to meet. I really just want to meet someone who isn’t powerful or famous, just good company. But these gatherings are clearly lobbying occasions.

I talk to Peter Snape, MP for West Bromwich and an ex-railwayman.
He’s concerned about the effect on railways of the abolition of the Metropolitan Counties who gave much help to local lines. Bob Reid of BR is there, a thin, aquiline, rather interesting man physically. He would look just right in a monk’s cowl or on a cross.

Sitting at the desk a fresh approach to the new film occurs to me, forcefully and with the instant attraction of having solved an increasingly encumbrous problem – where to go with ‘Explorers’. A simple two-hander, a love story, a sort of ‘Long Encounter’.

A curious week, thus far. Charitably it’s part of a recovery and re-stocking after the last few hectic weeks, at its worst a reaffirmation that I really don’t know what to say next.

Down to the Python office to move this impasse momentarily with a T2000 interview. Michael Williams from
Fleet News
– a freight-oriented periodical – waits patiently, as from the room where the interview is to take place comes Arnon Milchan. Warm embraces, face against his stubbly chin – his shrewd, playful eyes close into a smile. Commiserations over lack of Hollywood Oscars, agree to meet for lunch in London soon, then back to
Fleet News
. Wonderful collision of two worlds.

Watch the
20/20
TV programme about
Brazil -
Terry as the little man who took on Hollywood … and won. Now officially enshrined in US mythology. Terry’s supporters (especially amongst journalists) are impressive. The programme, aired two weeks ago, apparently added 20% to the box-office.

No more GLC.
¹²⁶
As much as anything about their passing, I shall miss their radical and stimulating attempt to shift the centres of power and influence in this country from big institutions run by middle-class, public-school-educated men to everybody else normally excluded from power. And they’ve been open and extrovert and consultative.

I see from yesterday’s
Telegraph
that the lorry ban is to be ended immediately on 69 miles of road which the DTP has now taken over.
Sensitivity, tolerance, understanding and conciliation – it’s a spirit utterly alien to the Thatcher-inspired politics of the ’80’s. Irony is that it should take a woman to combine all the worst of the new male middle-class attitudes.

Some brighter news is the arrival in the post of Caroline H’s two ‘Cyril’ covers, which look bright and eye-catching and colourful. My hope is that they’ll be taken for Adrian Mole books and sell millions! These two, combined with the first sight of Alan Lee’s
Mirrorstone
cover, bode quite well for next Christmas and make me feel I’ve done some work after all!

Up and across the Heath just after nine. A cold east wind, but good for running. Pad past Michael Foot, who lurches from side to side as he walks, like a rather overloaded cart. He occasionally shouts for Diz [his dog, Disraeli].

Home for a long, leisurely levée. Ring TJ to wish him well for tomorrow’s start of
Personal Services
.

Down to the Shaftesbury Theatre. Rory Bremner, encountering me at yet another charity show, asks me if I work professionally any more.

I’m on at the end of the first hour, reading ‘Biggles’.
¹²⁷
At the difficult stage of knowing it just well enough to look away from the book long enough to lose my place. So one or two fluffs, which irritate me. Neil Kinnock and Glenys are down there in the front row.

Our ‘Custard Pie’ routine
³
does not disgrace us, but Graham ballses up the lines on a couple of occasions – and, as TG points out, ‘He’s the one with the script!’ All of us aware that it’s timid stuff compared to the quite frenetic energy of the Mayalls and Henrys and Edmondsons.

We’re all behind Geldof at about 11.30 singing ‘Feed the World’ and the show ends just on the four-hour mark.

Collect our carrier bags as Rik packs up his dead chicken, which he’d previously stuffed down his trousers, Frank Bruno, who’s been playing Juliet to Lenny Henry’s Romeo, removes his mediaeval bodice, and we all repair to the Marlboro’ Crest Hotel, where a party is provided.

Ade Edmondson tells the awful tale of how Bob Geldof, who had been playing the Cliff Richard part in the Young Ones hit, took it upon himself to smash Edmondson’s guitar live on stage, presumably thinking it was a prop. It was in fact a Fender something-or-other, Edmondson’s most prized possession.

Rik, talking of his disgusting act, says he was very worried about his parents seeing it, but his father had quite approved – ‘Just how they used to talk in the navy!’

Lunch with Tristram and Innes. Innes, in his bluff and hearty way, is quite a canny operator. He’s always nibbling away at the script in an effort to cut down on cost and time. The word ‘crowd’ in a script still terrifies the BBC.

Lunch with JC at Cage Imaginaire.

John looms in from Flask Walk looking like one of the steelworkers from
The Deer Hunter
, in a woolly hat and a chunky, inelegant windcheater. When he’s taken off his jacket he still has several layers of sports jackets and sweaters underneath.

He’s had bad ’flu for about a week, he says, and over the last few days it’s induced ‘the sort of depression I haven’t felt for ten years’. The root of the depression is the recurring Cleese bogey of feeling trapped – trapped by success, by work responsibilities like Video Arts, trapped even by the film he’s writing for me, Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis, with Charles Crichton … ‘Quite honestly, Mikey, if Charlie Crichton dropped dead tomorrow I probably would abandon it.’

What he does want to do … ‘I’ve reached a time in my life … ’ is learn, read, travel and not have any work responsibilities at all unless, for instance, ‘Louis Malle asks me to go to Greece for a few weeks’.

Taxi to the BBC for the first auditions at 10.15. Then finalise script with Tristram and spend the afternoon dictating the corrections to Innes’s secretary.

The office opposite is occupied by Ken Trodd – an intense and slightly disconcerting presence. His office is full of junk. His clothes are everywhere and in the middle of it all a TV shows DBS programmes from Ted Turner’s US channel.
¹²⁸

To outward appearance there is an air of precarious improvisation, but undoubtedly this shabbily-appointed fifth floor at TV Centre is where the British Film Industry exists. Chris Morahan, Gavin Millar, Alan Clarke, all have current projects under discussion. Richard Eyre is in production. Fifteen or so films are made here in a year, on a rolling programme which the ‘Wardour Street’ film industry never seems able to achieve.

Talk to Tom about his continuing inability to concentrate on his ‘A’ Level maths course. I just want to keep the lines of communication open with him. His friends are largely a street crowd and in many cases his academic inferiors, but he has a strong loyalty to them, which sometimes gets in the way of his work. I feel it’s very hard for me to advise him not to spend so much time with these people.